What are you doing for International Women's Day this year?
Same as every year: being a woman.
But what is a woman? Is it about body parts?
Yes. (And mind parts.)
What do you mean “yes”?
I guess if “No Means No”, then Yes Means Yes.
But if it's about body parts, what about men who identify as women?
They aren't women, they're men experimenting with “identity”.
But they identify as women, they choose the female gender.
I don't care if they identify as hippopotami, that doesn't make them hippopotami.
That sounds trans-phobic.
I'm not saying they can't say how they feel.
What about hate?
(???) I'm against it.
What about J.K. Rowling's attack on trans-folk?
Keeping them out of women's washrooms isn't “attacking” them. Stopping them from saying their piece would be attacking them, but they can and do say their piece.
You're just being triggering.
Indeed. Trigger warning: unsafe space ahead. It's called private thoughts.
SOME FEMINISTS WHO FOUGHT FOR OUR RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF SPEECH:
Nellie McClung -- Canadian novelist, columnist, MLA, reformer and delegate to the League of Nations
Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes -- persecuted by governments and churches for spreading information to women about birth control
Many brave women in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East today -- ditto
Catherine Dawson Scott -- launched PEN International in 1921 for the protection of writers everywhere
Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- wrote The Woman's Bible, and said "... in the sunset of life … I feel it to be my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear".
* * * * * * * *
It is a mistake for feminists to assume, in contrast to these free-speaking thinkers, that speech must be censored because some women (black, indigenous, queer or otherwise called "marginalized") must be protected from ideas and open discussion. In fact, women have always been at the centre of the world. In Atlantic Monthly in 1864, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "women are the real architects of society". Ironically, some today are being de-platformed by Critical Social Justice Theory. Far from marginalized, women actually made the world -- check out some examples of (centralized) women here:https://canadianteachermagazine.com/2020/10/01/who-is-marginalized/
The religious authorities of (philosopher-mathematician) Hypatia's day, they who felt it their mandate to control the speech of others ("nailing their tongues to the floor" as Antigone called it), had a gang of illiterate monks murder Hypatia in Alexandria, Egypt, in 415 AD. Her ideas were considered dangerous, evil, wrong-headed. Such judgements against open discussion need to be resisted repeatedly, since no era, including ours, is free of them.
For Hypatia's story as a dialogue, go to:
“The Life and Death of Hypatia of Alexandria”, Sundial Magazine, January 2021. https://sites.google.com/view/sundial-magazine/curios/the-life-and-death-of-hypatia?authuser=0
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